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In January of 2014, I wrote a piece for this blog entitled The Advantages and Disadvantages of Wearable Tech. In it, I made a few informed guesses about a burgeoning, and very intriguing, market. Google Glass had just been released in a limited capacity and companies like Microsoft and Apple had already begun work on competing products. Since then we’ve gotten items like the Pebble smartwatch, the Apple Watch, the Fitbit and the Microsoft Band, to name just a few.

A few months ago I wrote a post about wearable tech and the societal impact it might have, both upon the wearer of said tech and the people around them. In it, I mentioned that early adopters of these items might be ridiculed and stigmatized by those who did not fully understand the devices and what applications they might have. Now, a new survey by the Pew Research Center has shown my prediction to be accurate. More than half of the people they surveyed said that they believed that wearable tech would have a negative impact upon society, and women seemed especially wary of these items, with the huge majority of those surveyed responding negatively to the idea of items like Google Glass. However, these questions were only a small part of a much larger study. Pew, in conjunction with Smithsonian magazine, recently interviewed 1,001 Americans across the country, asking them for their opinion about various future technologies, most of which are expected to be here rather soon. The results of their study are fascinating, and the implications of their results are certainly interesting to ponder.

Most of us realize that transmitting information over the internet has its share of risks. That’s why so many of us only share sensitive information, like credit card and social security numbers, with so-called “secure sites,” otherwise known as 'https’ at the beginning of a web address. However, as we learned on April 7th, 2014, even secure sites can fail us from time to time. In fact, as we soon were made aware, millions of secure sites had in fact been failing us, for more than two years. A full two-thirds of websites rely on a program called OpenSSL to encrypt user information, making it possible for visitors to complete credit card transactions and other similarly private tasks without fear that their information could be stolen. What most of us didn’t realize until April 7th was that there was a small error, since nicknamed the Heartbleed bug, in the coding of OpenSSL. It had been there since the very beginning, December of 2011. By abusing this error, hackers could gather some of the information OpenSSL had been put in place to encrypt. In other words, all of that information you shared in confidence, safe in the knowledge that the site you were using was secure, was seemingly up for grabs.

Smart watches have taken the world of wearable technology by storm, and it’s becoming hard to imagine life before this level of accessibility. A few years ago it was unthinkable to believe something as small as a watch could replace our cell phones, yet every day we are getting closer to this becoming a reality. In this ever-changing world of tech advancements, the line between what we need and what we want is really starting to blur.

In 2009, an experiment was conducted. Its intent was to determine the viability of a concept known as “cryptocurrency,” funds which could be traded for goods and services like traditional money but with complete confidentiality. In our current economic system that level of security is virtually impossible. Money is regulated by governments and as such anything you do with it will remain under some level of scrutiny. In order to trade money for goods and services identities must be revealed and sensitive information must be shared. In theory, cryptocurrency would eliminate those elements. Each transaction would be blind, an unknown party doing business with another unknown party for their mutual benefit. This idea had been entirely theoretical until the “experiment” of 2009. It was conducted by a “crypto-specialist” who went by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. He invented the world’s first actual cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin, essentially just to see if he could. As you might imagine, the currency had no value at all. Nakamoto’s invention was entirely hypothetical, essentially imaginary. That would soon change.